


O Death

by TheDweeb



Series: FFXIVWrite2018 [8]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Dragonsong War, Gen, Here there be dragons, Post-Battle, Tumblr: FFXIVwrite2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-13 18:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18946654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDweeb/pseuds/TheDweeb
Summary: Death would come for him one day. It would not come on leathery wings, breathing fire, ice, or lightning. This was no longer his fight.





	O Death

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt 10 of FFXIVWrite2018

Tired gray eyes surveyed the battlefield as his heavy heart dropped lower and lower until it reached his knees. Weighed down by weariness, he sank to the ground, the clank of plate armor hitting the earth swallowed by the wind. He pressed his naked forehead to the earth, his helmet having been knocked off him in the battle, and said a soft prayer to Halone to guide Her warriors to the hallowed halls of Her realm. It was the least she could do since they died in Her name.

Lifting himself until he was settled on his heels, he gazed around the area once more. Blood stained the grass and the earth strewn with the bodies of men, women, and dragons. The hulking form of an enormous, spike shelled dragon lay at the epicenter of the most concentrated of the destruction; the final nail in the coffin. It had been brought low, signalling the retreat of what remained of the horde, but at great cost. Looking down at his own bloodstained gloves he asked himself–and not for the first time–was it all worth it? Turning back to the carrion field that was once grazing grounds for karakul herds, he finally had his answer.

He pushed himself off the ground, gloves shucked from his hands and discarded where they lay. His tabard, torn and stained with blood from so many sources he could not tell what was his and what was a dragon’s, was next. When he was somewhere out of sight and away from contested territory he would be rid of his armor. It would be easy enough to pilfer a shepherd’s clothes from the drying line, if dishonest, but a knight had no need to travel to the Black Shroud. No, no longer a knight but a deserter. A lump of shame formed in his throat at the thought. He could hear his father now, calling him a fool and a coward.

‘ _What knight abandons his duty? What son abandons his family_?!’

“I do,” he whispered to no one.

Shuffling along, he picked his way through the dead careful not to disturb their rest. Too, a grounded dragon was not necessarily a dead one. There had been many a knight who had met their end thinking a beast slain when it was merely wounded. His sister had been one. As he neared the edge of the carnage, however, it seemed he would not meet her fate.

A splash of color caught his eye just before he stepped over a body, the threshold from death to freedom. Teal against cold silver–the knight’s tabard having been torn away in the fighting–sent his heart farther down, anchoring his feet to the ground. He knew that man, or at least the man he had been. They had grown up together, fought together, and once made a promise that they would die together or not at all. Which of them broke that promise?

“Forgive me, Villenoux,” he said as he gazed down into a face made for smiles that was now a bloody ruin, nigh unrecognizable. Were it not for that sachet he would have never known it was his best friend who lay in the bloodied dirt.

At his sides his fingers twitched. Quickly, he leaned down and snatched the teal sachet that his friend had worn about his neck. A memento of his mother who had died when he was young. He could never remember her face, but he could remember the smell of flowers that always clung to her skin. In its place he left his family’s signet ring, passed on to him when all that came home of his elder brother was his right arm. Around Villenoux’s neck it went, and with it the last vestiges of his family ties. He was free.

The weight lifted from his feet, rising to settle hard yet steady into his chest. Without so much as a backward glance, Devereux Mauglein stepped over the remains of his past. His chains had been cast off with the necklace and ring and the yoke of nearly a thousand years of death and destruction lay behind him. He would no longer be bound by the duties of dead men, nor would he be witness to any more slaughter. Perhaps that was why Halone had spared him. Or perhaps She too thought him a coward. Whatever his reasons for living he knew that he would keep doing so, and in the end, when all was ash and blood, he would look back and see Villenoux, Maisette, and Bastien and know that he was right.


End file.
